MainlyMartian

Waiting for radar

The uncertainties about the Marsis radar on Mars Express have not gone away. As I mentioned back here, doubts were raised this spring about the safety of deploying the radar's antennae, because it seemed possible that they would snap back and hit the spacecraft itself, which would probably be bad and possibly catastrophic. According to the ESA website, analysis of the problem has yet to provide an all clear, and so deployment is being further delayed, on the basis that it's better to do without Marsis data -- which might conceivably provide evidence of liquid water in deep aquifers -- than to endanger the whole mission. The system won't now be deployed until October, if then. There's a little more discussion of the ESA statement in a report at BBC Online.

If the risks of deployment look too great to face this year, though, that may change with time. There must surely come a point at which the trade-off between preserving the spacecraft's remaining life at all costs and getting data from the radar starts to tip in the radar's favour. Once the Omega spectrometer and the HRSC camera have covered most of the planet's surface, and when the atmospheric instruments have been able to capture a full Mars year of readings, I suspect the case for risking the remainder of the mission in the hope of getting some qualitatively new data will seem a good bit stronger. That would be some time in early 2006. If by that time there's a consensus on a specific source region for the methane, the case for deployment would, I suspect, be seen as stronger still.

Another issue that might conceivably factor into the decision would be the risk of getting scooped. In March 2006 the Sharad radar will arrive on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; its antenna will be deployed about six months later, after aerobraking. Sharad is designed to make a different sort of measurement; it confines itself to the shallow sub-surface and has much higher resolution. It's not in a position to discover big deep aquifers. But it's conceivable that Sharad might pick up evidence of shallow aquifers in some places, if there are any such aquifers there. And a discovery of liquid water by NASA would overshadow any further such discovery by ESA.

So a sense of competition might provide a marginal extra incentive for deploying Marsis before MRO gets into its science orbit in late 2006. But there might also be a case for waiting a little longer. The antenna deployment mechanisms for the two spacecraft are similar and designed by the same company -- it was work on the Sharad deployment that raised the possibility that there could be problems with Marsis. Data from a successful Sharad deployment might conceivably change the analysis-based picture of the risks of deploying Marsis. If Sharad's deployment can be seen as a test run for Marsis, it might be a good idea to let Sharad go first.

If deployment doesn't go ahead this year, the decision about what to do in a few years' time will be a very tricky one. Some Mars Express scientists will want to preserve the integrity of the spacecraft -- and of their own data streams -- come what may. Others will want to push for exploring the subsurface, even if that involves risks. And it's possible the risks aren't evenly distributed -- what if analysis shows deployment as being unlikely to hurt the spacecraft as a whole, but quite likely to poke out the eye of one of the other instruments...

Let's hope there'll be a good, open debate about this. But since we're dealing with ESA, let's not hold our breaths.

PS: for those interested, I've added some links to good obits to the end of the Tommy Gold past

SpaceShipOne

Props to Burt Rutan and his team; SpaceShipOne flew to more or less the height expected on the day they said, and it was apparently a height that qualifies it for its name (just). I don't know much about aircraft/spacecraft design, but SpaceShipOne seemed to me to demonstrate that you can now implement something that does much of what the X-15 programme did -- and some things it didn't do -- using new technologies in a very elegant way. It is an inspiring sight, and a great achievement.

The flight also illustrated something which I often need reminding of; the hold that spaceflight novelties have on the media and on the public imagination. According to Brad Stone of Newsweek, there were nearly 600 journalists at the event, and more than ten thousand enthusiast spectators. Google News was listing over a 1000 stories on it. The last bit of successful human spaceflight that got that sort of attention, I suspect, was the first Hubble servicing mission; I don't think there was ever quite this much fuss about any ISS mission, but I may just not have noticed.

While acknowledging the excitement of the achievement, this fuss seems a trifle overblown. This was a small sub-orbital hop, and I really don't see how it scales up to being the herald of a world-changing paradigm shift, or the beginning of a new era. As Jeff Foust asks, is it not possible that SpaceShipOne is more like Paul MacCready's Gossamer Albatross than the Spirit of St Louis? (That said, while acknowledging that the SoSL was more significant than the Albatross, I'm always a bit puzzled as to why people make such a fuss about the solo flight when Alcock and Brown's earlier transatlantic flight was so much more thrilling -- wing walking in the snow, for God's sake -- as well as looking much more like a precursor of routine transatlantic flight to come, reliant as it is on crews and big planes. Yes, Lindbergh helped with the design as well as doing the flying, but his design innovations -- no view out front, for example -- were pretty precisely tailored to pulling off a stunt, rather than fecund foundations for future progress. Obviously national pride plays a role here, but shouldn't the odious fascist my-friend-Goering-has-the-right-idea stuff rather undercut that?)

Anyway, back to the fuss surrounding SpaceShipOne. The problem is that reaching space in a way that lets you stay there is a lot harder that paying a flying visit. Orbit is a matter of velocity, not altitude; to stay in orbit you need to have reached a speed of Mach 25. That means more fuel and more powerful rockets and a much smaller payload fraction. And the amount of energy a spacecraft needs to get rid of when coming back to the earth is proportional to the square of its velocity in space. The amount of energy per unit mass you have to shed coming back from orbit will be 70 times that needed to come to a stop after flying at Mach three. SpaceShipOne's "re-entry" was pretty impressive in terms of aerodynamic control. However it didn't require anything like the sort of thermal protection that coming back from orbit does.

This is why sceptical voices doubt that SpaceShipOne and its X-prize ilk can really do much to further access to orbit -- the problems are of a different magnitude. There are undoubted advantages to the nimble development programmes aimed at sub-orbital flight for paying customers, as Rutan has shown. They allow new concepts to be tried. They allow test-a-little, redesign-a-little, test-a-little approaches that can be very fruitful. (That's why it's no bad news that things went wrong on SpaceShipOne - the whole idea of testing is to find things to fix.) Developing sub-orbital skills lets you evolve appropriate operational know-how, can provide continuous reassurance that things are working and progress is being made, and makes it easier for a sensible regulatory framework to evolve. It even allows you to generate income (though how well that will work after the first crash remains to be seen). But even so, it's hard to see how all that good stuff lets you bridge the gap between suborbital and orbital.

A while back Clark Lindsey asked various notables about these issues, and compiled their answers into a really excellent discussion (part one here, part two here) on Jeff Foust's Space Review. (There’s a lot of good stuff on the Space Review site, and a very good signal-to-noise ratio.) The key question, I think, was raised by Henry Spencer. Once you've developed a workable aircraft that lets paying customers do more or less what Mike Melvill did in SpaceShipOne on Monday -- thrill of acceleration, amazing view, weightlessness, achievement of space travel in arbitrary altitude terms -- will further improvements in performance pay their way in terms of increasing the revenue you can generate? The costs will probably climb quite steeply as you push that envelope out towards orbital capability. But how much more will people be willing to pay for a system that doubles their time in free fall, or that brings them back down on the far side of an ocean, or lets them launch a slightly larger LEO satellite at apogee?

I find it hard to believe that the revenues from ever more capable vehicles will grow as quickly as their development costs do. I may be wrong. Burt Rutan is not stupid, and does not seem given to idle boasts. Jeff Foust reports him saying that they'll be getting orbital quicker than most of us expect. Maybe he has technological tricks no one else has, or a business plan that generates billions from suborbital applications. Maybe Paul Allen has a skyhook in his skunkworks. But for the time being I remain sceptical.

For many people, though, the question of what SpaceShipOne might lead to is almost overshadowed by the way it was developed: using private, rather than government, money. It seems self-evident to them that something done with private capital is somehow better than something done by a government. Now I have no doubt that there are things that private enterprise does much better than government; the evidence for this is clear. But it seems to me something of a leap to say that private enterprise is intrinsically superior for all purposes, or even, as some seem to hint, morally so.

The idea that something achieved by people working for a billionaire is somehow more human, and easier to identify with, than something achieved by people working for a representative government is not one I find very easy to understand. And it can lead you to silliness, as when Michael Potter and Rick Tumlinson sneer that governments keep space travel the preserve of "a few very well paid government and very well trained employees". I don't know what an astronaut earns, but I don't think many people dependent on government salaries are likely to be paying customers on SpaceShipOne's commercial offspring any time soon.

And there's another thing. I like space exploration, especially when it provides scientific knowledge and cultural perspective, which much of it does. I think it's something people should do. But I don't think it's the most important thing people should do, and I'm aware that the $15 billion a year spent on NASA could save millions of lives if spent on strengthening and widening access to existing programmes on tuberculosis, malaria, maternal health, vaccination and childhood disease in the developing world. And that would be a very good thing; a better thing, in fact, than stimulating my intellect.

When the allocation of resources is a matter for governments, I can take refuge in the knowledge that transferring that money from one set of accounts to another just isn't politically possible. That sort of saves me from having to face the implicit choice between the two, and allows me to enjoy the intellectual stimulation of space travel without too much guilt over the opportunity costs involved. (I wrote a bit on this here when John Brockman asked for science advice to President Bush a few years ago.)

In private philanthropy, the choice is starker. Even if he wanted to, it would be really hard for George Bush to have NASA's budget spent on health issues in developing countries. However it would be quite easy for Paul Allen to spend his wealth that way. Indeed the experience of Allen's former partner, Bill Gates, suggests that it would be possible to do so effectively and on the grandest of scales. Paul Allen is free to do as he likes with his money, and what he is doing is exciting and fun; he also gives a lot more to his own charitable foundations than he has spent on SpaceShipOne. I know in my own life I don't spend as much of my time or my money on development issues and well focused philanthropy as I should; Paul Allen is not only vastly more generous than I in absolute terms but quite possibly in relative terms, too. But when we all get caught up dreaming about what large amounts of private money could be doing for a space-faring few in the future, it's worth keeping in mind what that money could be doing for millions who are suffering in the present.

Tommy Gold

Tommy Gold has died at the age of 84. He was a man with an ego so well developed it allowed him to think whatever he damned well wanted to think, regardless of received opinion, and with an intellect so well developed that this kicking against the pricks was very often interesting and sometimes right. An obituary provided by Cornell, where he spent four decades, can be found here, and below I've pasted the introduction to a Q&A I did with him for Wired a few years ago, very lightly resubbed. The full article is here, and while it was a bugger to transcribe there's echt Gold in it.

I never became a true believer in the abiogenic deep hydrocarbons, but interviewing him was fascinating. There was something a little off-putting about the way that he could deride the whole discipline of geology as fickle and stupid (he thought plate tectonics was obviously silly, as well as traditional theories about fossil fuels); but at the same time there was a tremendous exhilaration to his self assurance.

After finishing the piece, it struck me that I should do Fred Hoyle, too, for a matched set, but he died before I could match my deeds to the thought.

I don't know whether Gold's death was sudden or not. If he was still functioning this spring, I feel sure he would have seen methane on Mars as a vindication of his beliefs, and have been cross that everybody else didn't see it in the same way.

Here's the intro

"Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA and helped to crack the genetic code; since then he has worked on biological problems from the nature of consciousness to the function of dreams to the origin of life. And through it all Crick, now 84, has been known to friends as a particularly gifted thrower of parties. Back in 1947, amid the privations of postwar Cambridge, England, two students walked into one of these parties, held in Crick's flat on Trumpington Street, and paused to scan the great-minds-in-formation. Crick was holding court in the middle of the room, surrounded by young women. In the far corner stood a clear-faced, rather stern-looking man. "That's Gold of Gold and Pumphrey," said one of the students, referring to the team then doing groundbreaking research on the workings of the ear. "No, no," his companion replied, "that's Gold of Bondi and Gold," the brilliant pair of mathematicians then rewriting the rules of cosmology. The stern face across the room, picking up on their confusion through a trick in the apartment's acoustics, broke into a smile.

"The eavesdropper, and the Gold on both scientific teams, was the same man: Thomas Gold, a physicist who has enjoyed a career broad enough in its enthusiasms to make even Francis Crick look narrow. Gold has worked in the highest reaches of Big Science -- overseeing the construction and operation of the world's largest radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico -- while also excelling at the sort of research that requires nothing more than a pencil, paper, and an idea. He has reimagined the whisperings inside the ear, the universe as a whole, and, most recently, the ground beneath your feet. And he's done so with a profound indifference to the opinions of others. Gold is not just wide-ranging: He's a world-class contrarian. Very few people agree with him on everything, which suggests he's sometimes wrong. But he's also sometimes right. And he's always either interesting or infuriating, depending on where you're coming from.

"In his ninth decade, Gold is championing the idea that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth -- plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumococcus -- are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth's crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth's surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth's crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons.

"Presented in full in his 1999 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere, Gold's theory of life below the Earth's surface is an outgrowth of his heretical theories about the origins of oil, coal, and natural gas. In the traditional view these substances are the residues of dead creatures. When organic matter from swamps and seafloors gets buried deep enough in the crust, it goes through chemical changes that distill it into hydrocarbons we can then dig up and burn. Gold believes none of this. He's convinced that the hydrocarbons we use come from chemical stocks that were incorporated into the Earth at its creation.

"Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Gold has been saying that the Earth is hugely well endowed with these hydrocarbons -- hundreds of times more so than most geologists, or oil companies, or OPEC leaders believe. The general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among oil producers for decades.

"But this is one Gold theory that very few agree with. Conventional petroleum geologists are quite happy with their view that hydrocarbons are created by the burial of organic material to depths where moderate levels of heat and pressure "cook" it into oil and gas, which then migrate through the crust to the sorts of sedimentary structures best suited to trap them. Geochemists argue that the bulk of the world's hydrocarbons couldn't possibly reside in the Earth's mantle, as Gold posits; at that depth, hydrocarbons would react with the mantle, oxidizing into carbon dioxide, a process which, Gold's foes believe, is evident in the belching forth of carbon dioxide from the Earth's volcanoes. As Steve Drury, who reviewed Gold's book for Geological Magazine, puts it, "Any Earth scientist will take a perverse delight in reading the book, because it is entertaining stuff, but even a beginner will see the gaping holes where Gold has deftly avoided the vast bulk of mundane evidence regarding our planet's hydrocarbons."

"If a maverick theory of oil were all there was to the Tommy Gold story, he could easily be dismissed as a crank. But he is an enormously respected physicist. When the first radio astronomers started seeing radio sources in the sky, they thought they were unusual stars; from the early 1950s onward, Gold championed the idea that they were actually distant galaxies, and after a long and acrimonious dispute, he was shown to be right. Later, in the 1960s, a new sort of radio source was detected in the skies, one that flashed on and off regularly. Gold rushed into print with the idea that these pulsars were astrophysical oddities called neutron stars, the existence of which had been predicted in the 1930s but had never been seen. Many of his colleagues thought the idea outrageous. It was right on the money.

"But he isn't always right. In the 1940s, early in his career, Gold developed the idea of a "steady-state universe" with Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, when the three of them left their wartime jobs in the British Admiralty and made their way back to Cambridge. (Bondi and Gold, both Viennese, had met as refugees, sleeping on the concrete floor of a British internment camp before their mathematical talents were pressed into service on naval radar programs.) The hypothesis has now been almost completely rejected in favor of the big bang theory. But for a while the steady-state idea, in which expansion was eternal and creation continuous, was the most satisfying scientific explanation of the universe around. Though cosmologists now think it wrong, few think it stupid.

"Some Gold interventions, however, don't look so impressive in hindsight. His suggestion that the moon might be deeply covered by very fine dust -- an idea he insists was misrepresented by academic enemies -- has been widely dismissed since the Apollo landings. (Gold now thinks the moon, too, may well have a deep biosphere - as may many other bodies in the solar system.) And his ideas about hydrocarbons remain widely disputed.

"But Gold still argues passionately for his "abiogenic" (not biological in origin) theory of oil. In the 1980s he persuaded researchers in Sweden to drill a hole some 6 kilometers deep into solid granite -- a rock that crystallizes out of molten lava deep within the Earth, and thus should not contain any organic remains -- and succeeded in finding some oil. This didn't convince the geology community, which felt that the oil must have gotten into the granite through cracks. But Gold took it as a vindication.

"In the Swedish experiment, he also saw vindication of his related -- and possibly more fruitful -- theory of the deep hot biosphere. One of the arguments that geologists use to point to biological sources for oil is that some oil molecules look very much like molecules found in living cells. But Gold has turned this argument on its head, interpreting the telltale molecules as signs that there is life feeding on the hydrocarbons deep below us, not constituting them. Instead of dead creatures turning into hydrocarbons when buried (the source of the term fossil fuels), Gold says the hydrocarbons are fuel on which creatures buried in the Earth's depths survive.

"Today, Gold sees other evidence of the deep hot biosphere. There's life on the floors of the oceans, making use of the chemicals gushing out of volcanic vents, and there have been bacteria turning up in deep holes all around the world -- in the Columbia River basalts of Washington, in oil wells in the North Sea, in South African gold mines, and in the Swedish drilling program Gold set up. And though most planetary scientists are unconvinced by the claims made in 1996 that a Martian meteorite had fossils in it, thinking about the Mars rock focused people's minds on the possibility that a planet with a lifeless surface need not have a lifeless interior.

"Listening to Gold make his case in his home in Ithaca, New York -- where for 20 years he ran the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research -- is to hear one of the 20th century's true scientific originals. His voice -- still recognizably Viennese -- is softer than it once was, but his combative spirit is undimmed. He still works on ideas ranging from the cosmological to the geophysical. He still gets a kick out of pointing to other people's mistakes. And he's still convinced, perhaps now more than ever, that he's discovered one of the great secrets of life."

Update, June 29th: A couple of interesting obits from The Guardian (by Anthony Tucker, who is himself dead, which is weird) and from The Independent, a must-read because it's by Hermann Bondi himself.

Lost in Space

Back in January I reviewed Greg Klerkx's "Lost in Space: The Fall of Nasa and the Dream of a New Space Age" (Amazon US/UK) for the Guardian. One reason this might have passed you by is that they didn't publish the review until a couple of weeks ago, since which time Richard Branson has kindly added a touch of topicality to the issues involved. For those of you who are interested, the review can be found here.

What I didn't mention, since I chose to focus on the book's argument rather than its narratives, is that there are some rather good chapters on Devon Island and the Haughton Mars Project. Five months on and without the book to hand the details escape me, but I remember a nicely drawn sense of the experience of being up there -- exciting, romantic, somewhat arduous, the days often surreally suffused with the attentions of the news media, significant parts of the unearthly, unending evenings devoted to dissing Bob Zubrin.

Meanwhile, on Mars

Those of you thinking that there hasn't been a whole lot of Mars on this blog recently (and I'm one of you) are warmly advised to check out two excellent state-of-play articles by Bruce Moomaw on SpaceDaily.com. This one deals with Spirit in Gusev, and this one with Opportunity in Meridiani.

The gist is that Spirit is covering greater distances per day than anyone ever planned, and will soon be checking out what appear to be layered rocks in the Columbia Hills. The hills (which I think Larry Soderblom and his colleagues at the USGS now think are part of the rim of a crater-in-a-crater) are older than the plains Spirit is traversing, and they offer the rover's best chance of making a discovery about ancient Mars. (It's main discovery so far is that there is a small amount of weathering on rocks in Gusev that seems to accord with the presence of frost or ice or snow in ice-ages).

Meanwhile Opportunity is going to be sent down into Endeavour crater as quickly as possible, because the new "deep sleep" regime it has been forced into risks crippling the mini-TES system, which is needed to make some mineralogical sense of the deposits in the crater that it will be able to see but not to sample. As I read Bruce, the surveys of Endeavour from its rim are suggesting that this detailed exam may revise or even gainsay the sea-side interpretation of the sulphur-rich rocks in Eagle crater.

It should be an interesting month.

Big hole update

Just to note that the wonderful Dome C ice-core data that was premiered without a journalistic murmur in Nice a month and a half ago is now out in Nature. Gabrielle Walker has a feature story about the work on Nature's website. And here are a few dozen more, some of them not terribly good. For example, in the Globe and Mail the headline Human impact delaying ice age, study finds has no back-up whatsoever in the Bloomberg copy beneath it. And though Nature invited such comparisons by calling its press conference on the subject "The Day Before Yesterday", to say that this new research in some ways shows that the Emmerich movie isn't possible after all goes beyond over-egging the pudding to serving up an omelette instead. (FWIW, the kernel of truth in the movie is that warming could change the way heat flows from the equator to the poles in a way that would cool some northern regions, though it wouldn't cover them with ice, and which rather more importantly would change precipitation patterns in parts of the world where a lot of people rely on subsistence farming, which would be very bad. And this change could be abrupt, though that means a few years to a decade, rather than a very bad week.)

The news that's news in the Dome C stuff is that the record for which we now have gas and dust samples is about twice as long as the Vostok record, but the details of the gas and dust in the earlier parts of the core have not yet been fully analysed. So there's a great deal still to be done; as Richard Alley of Penn State replied, when the New York Times asked him about this "eagerly anticipated" data: "'The current publication is something akin to the first run on a new accelerator or the first look at a galaxy through the latest mega-telescope. The results are clearly of value in and of themselves, but are even more exciting for what they promise in the future.'"

However early analysis has already provided a carbon dioxide record covering all of Stage 11, which Vostok stops halfway through. Stage 11 is the previous interglacial that one would expect to be most like our own current interglacial, on the basis that the orbital parameters of the earth then and now are very similar. The Dome C data show the similarity in some detail, and in a way that seems to confirm recent predictions that left to itself the current interglacial should have a long time still to run.

The news that's not news, but that matters a lot, is summed up by Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey, the paper's co-ordinating author. From the body of that Bloomberg piece: "'If you're a greenhouse skeptic . . . then what you're looking for in the past is a time when carbon dioxide changed and temperature didn't change,' [Wolff] said. 'The bad news is, we can't find any of them. So our expectation is that if you go into the future and keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the climate will warm. [The carbon-dioxide level's] already 30 per cent higher than at any time in the last half-billion years.'"

Small black dot

So we got up at an unearthly hour, walked sleepily to Greenwich Park, and found that though the park opens at 06:00, the gates to the park don't (well one does -- the south gate -- but that was a long way from us). So in an unaccustomed gesture of defiance (and something not completely unakin to athleticism) I climbed over the gate, and so did Nancy (blessing her Saki Saki trainers as she did so -- not only the coolest footwear ever, but also practical). So we got up to the observatory a good ten minutes before the first contact, to find a fair crowd in the courtyard and a lot of media (apparently Colin P was there, but I didn't see him). Christine McGourty of the BBC kindly gave us a spare set of eyewear so we could both stare at the sun with impunity, and we proceeded to do so. (That said, while proper glasses make it possible, the sheer heat of the proposition still makes staring at the summer sun uncomfortable, even early in the morning. I guess all the people who spend good money to lie on beaches glistening with sweat with their eyes shut behind normal dark glasses don't mind about this. Seems pretty damn unpleasant to me.)

The powers of suggestion are a wonderful thing. Once the people with the 'scopes were shouting "first contact" it was quite possible to start imagining that there was something a little odd happening around the seven o'clock mark. And after a while there really was something a little odd happening around the seven o'clock mark. Where the imagining left off and the reality took over, though, I wouldn't have liked to say. Suffice to say that eventually there was a genuine dot there. A tiny planet-sized dot.

A transit of Venus turns out to be the most unspectacular spectacular event you will ever see (if you contrive to be alive during one of the relevant opportunities). If your previous experience of looking at the sun has been an eclipse, there is almost literally nothing to see here. (I think the disc of Venus passing across the sun is 1,000 times smaller than the disc of the moon, but don't take my word for it.) And yet it's spectacular to the mind, if not the eye. It is roughly speaking the closest to another planet we will ever get. I don't know if transits involve a closer passage than normal conjunctions -- I have an intuitive feel that they might, but don't trust intuition on such things -- but the actual distance is only part of the nearness. More important is seeing the planet resolved as a disk, rather than a point, with our naked eyes, which is strangely affecting. Something as big as our whole world, so small to the eye, and yet so near, cosmically speaking.

It's the only planet-as-a-disc I ever expect to see. The next opportunity for such a sight (after the 2012 transit) will be backward glances from people off to the moon, and that's not a trip i expect many if any of us to be taking. If anyone reading this does ends up past geosynchronous orbit, please send me an email.

Back in the here and now it was a more-or-less unique chance to actually see the solar system at work. Nancy, who is more patient than me, watched from our back roof long enough to experience a sense of the planet's movement, a tiny enlightening shadow acting like part of an orrery. I looked up, on and off, while going about daily business; and I greatly enjoyed having the eyewear with which to show the butcher and the cheesemonger and the greengrocer what was up in the sky. So the morning was punctuated with brief moments of shared amazement as something 41 million kilometres away crawled from A to B.

Around noon, back up to the observatory. A few last looks through the hydrogen-alpha-filtered telescope provided by the excellent Flamsteed Society, the sun angry red, its edge delicately frilled with prominences. And then it went away, never to be seen like this again, from here, in our lives.

"Open in a different sort of way"

Sorry to have been away so long. When the Beagle report came out, I was happily wandering around the Cheviots, near the English/Scottish border. And I'd have been a lot less happy if I'd been discovering that ESA was refusing to publish the results of the Beagle inquiry. In fact I'd have been really quite cross.

I mean we paid for the damn thing. We deserve an account of how it was lost. Or rather, of the various ways in which it might have been lost, since no smoking gun ever turned up. I'm a European with a fair degree of sympathy for our current continental project, but this sort of behind-closed-doors, if-we'd-been-in-charge-it-would-have-been-OK approach reminds me just why European institutions are not trusted by the public. Combine this euro-paternalism with the market-supremacist anglo-saxon "commercial confidentiality" stuff -- is there really no way that companies doing public work can be forced to do without this confidentiality when their work clearly failed? -- and it feels like the worst of all possible worlds.

It's also a disservice to people elsewhere trying to put together future space missions. The reports into the 1999 NASA losses had a lot of nuggets for future mission designers. (The fact that the most important of them -- "you really should have a radio link sending telemetry back as you go through the atmosphere" -- was ignored by the Beaglers doesn't mean it wasn't a crucial lesson. Quite the reverse.)

You have to feel for poor David Southwood, ESA's head of science. My friends at the Economist quote him saying "We live in an open society too, but it's open in a different way", and conceding "that having the inspector general of ESA chair the inquiry did 'a little bit of harm to the word independent'." I'll say. But sorry though one feels for Southwood -- he's a nice, smart guy who must be embarrassed about having to say things like that -- his position is not a terribly good one. In fact, you could argue that Southwood really should have resigned by now. According to an interview he did with Pallab for BBC online, Southwood thought Beagle should have been cancelled back in 2001 because it was too risky. And he thought that if he had argued this way within ESA, he could have got it cancelled. And he didn't try.

If he had, we might have avoided losing the hefty-but-still-indeterminate (can't ESA and/or the British government even release a full project budget to us all? Or is that commercially sensitive too?) sum spent on Beagle 2. If that money (and effort) had not been spent on Beagle 2 we might have saved Eddington, killed by budget pressure last year. We might even have an ESA-sanctioned Netlander ready for 2007. (Netlander would probably have died anyway; but being in a position to say it would be the first European mission to the martian surface might have done it some good)

Everyone says that you shouldn't be swayed by hindsight. But Southwood had foresight. He looked at the Beagle project, and with admirable foresight thought "this is too risky -- I should really argue for its cancellation". And then he went along with it. By way of justification he suggests that ESA needed to become a bit faster cheaper and better. But the Mars Express programme met those requirements even without Beagle on board. The parliamentary committee that's going to hold hearings on the loss of Beagle 2 might like to take these matters up with him.

Meanwhile, Pillinger pours scorn on the ESA report's published recommendations as "motherhood statements". I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Maybe Pillinger doesn't approve of motherhood much. If he did, then maybe Beagle 2 would have complied with a few more of these "motherhood statements". Take number 10: "Future planetary missions should be designed with robust margins to cope with the inherent uncertainties, and they should not be initiated without adequate and timely resources to achieve that." Yes, it may be a motherhood statement -- but it didn't apply to Beagle 2. Likewise number 12: "For future planetary entry missions, a more robust communications system should be used, allowing direct commanding of the lander for essential actuations and resets without software involvement -- enabling recoveries in catastrophic situations." Likewise most of the rest of the recommendations.

These recommendations would have more heft if the report showing the degree to which Beagle didn't match up to them were to be published, and I think it's scummy that it's not available to Colin any more than to the rest of us (though he's been briefed on it). But even without the report, you kind of have to assume that when the recommendations say something like (number 15) "Elimination of internal connectors for mass saving should be avoided if at all possible. But if unavoidable, a stringent system of check and independent crosscheck should be followed during the final wiring operation," it means that Beagle 2 did eliminate some internal connectors to save mass, and that a stringent system of check and independent crosscheck wasn't followed. That's not a motherhood statement. It appears to be a clear, specific criticism.

But Colin is not very good on criticism. I remember hearing him and David Southwood talking about this at a press event at the Royal Society last year. Colin took umbrage at the suggestion that outside review was necessary, and did so in what I found a rather striking way. As I remember it -- I'd be open to correction -- he argued that no-one had a greater interest in the success of Beagle 2 than the Beagle 2 team, and so no one would do a better job of evaluating the project than they themselves would do. I think this was a) sincere and b) testimony to the fact that Colin just doesn't see the point of outside criticism. I'd say this is a significant lack in someone trying to manage something as complex and un-get-rightable as a planetary lander mission.

The Pill now seems to be taking the line that it was Mars that failed, not the Beagle. The martian atmosphere obstinately refused to perform in the way it was expected to, and that screwed everything up. I don't know how plausible this is -- as I mentioned before, there's some doubt on the matter, and the views of the ESA panel are of course unavailable to us -- but even if it is plausible, a) other failure modes are plausible too and b) surely a decent lander design should have taken atmospheric uncertainties into account. But the idea that Beagle 2 was imperfect in any way (other, perhaps, than a lack of support, financial and otherwise) is not one Colin explores very readily in public.

Talking to Tim Radford in the Guardian, he tells us that the way the Beagle 2 team pulled together was "a model that everybody should follow". To put it mildly, there is no evidence that this is the case. He goes on to say "I think we probably did more to inspire interest in science and engineering in the country than anything else ever done before." Really? Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- or for that matter Frank Hornby -- thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Colin goes on to say "I don't think the country will begrudge Beagle 2 being given some more money". On this last one, he may well be right. Most people don't really care about what space missions do. They're just glad we have them. Heroic failure now and then just makes it more romantic, in a cavalier sort of way. I, on the other hand, want space missions to work, not to waste money, and to produce data. It's not clear to me that Beagle 2 fits this roundhead agenda at all.

There's a tendency -- Tim shows it, I think the Independent editorialised along the same lines, and I've picked it up elsewhere -- to indulge the romantic spirit, and the Pill. To say "at least they tried" and "they nearly got there" (an untested assumption -- Beagle 2 may have been dead three times over from different faults, or incapable of doing science. We just don't know). And then to suggest the team should try again. I think this is a tendency worth resisting. A lot of people's hard work was lost because the Beagle 2 project was mismanaged, rushed and hand to mouth. The romantic response to this point is a better-to-have-loved-and-lost sort of thing; people say that if Beagle 2 hadn't been mismanaged, rushed and hand to mouth it would never have happened in the first place. Well here's the thing. Whatever happened in teh first place, in the final analysis it didn't happen.

Obviously there's good stuff to be taken from the Beagle 2 experience. But it was bought at a stiff price. And to say that there were not real lessons to be learned, and it shouldn't have been handled very differently and that it was just unlucky, and that all we need do now is try again -- that's just insulting to the idea of doing these things properly. Which is bad for the people who pay for these projects, and bad for the people who work on them.